Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 SATA NCQ Hard Drive

When it's time to shop for hard drives, one of the several names that comes to mind right away is Seagate. And when it comes time to recommending a disc drive, warranty is always one of the top concerns. Seagate has the longest warranty around right now at five years. Five years is much better than the one year warranty that the industry started moving to a couple years ago. Seagate's move to five years has resulted in other companies thinking twice about their 1-year warranties.

Seagate is no stranger to innovation. It was the first company to build 5.25-inch hard disc drives for the PC. That was a quarter century ago though, but Seagate hasn't stopped innovating since its establishment in 1979. More recently, Seagate led the development of Serial ATA (SATA) to replace Parallel ATA (PATA) disc drives, and it was the first company to demonstrate NCQ drives. Many of you are already familiar with NCQ, but for those who aren't, here is a quick description from Seagate:

Native Command Queuing (NCQ) is a command protocol for SATA that makes it possible to have several outstanding commands within a drive at the same time.

In simple terms, NCQ functioning is somewhat similar to an elevator. The elevator travels sequentially from floor to floor and lets people on and off. It does not follow the sequence in which users push the floor request buttons, because that would mean an excessive mechanical load and much longer times for waiting or riding. Source: Seagate.com

At the end of last year, Chad took a look at Seagate's first SATA NCQ drive - the Barracuda 7200.7 SATA NCQ. Today, I'm taking a look at its successor - the Barracuda 7200.8 SATA NCQ (model number ST3400832AS).